Affiliate Marketing Secrets

Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 2:29 pm

Secrets of Affiliate Marketing

One of the easiest and fastest way to earn a living online is through affiliate marketing. What “affiliate marketing” means is that you just refer visitors to someone else’s website, they do everything else! (make the product, design the sale page, handle the billing and support, etc.), and you get paid 50% or more

The benefits of this are

You’re able to start almost instantly without having to develop a product, craft a sales letter, design the website, come up with support tools, or get a merchant account and CRM.
You have basically zero investment of your time because they handle the billing, support, maintenance, etc.
Your efforts are risk-free, because the product owner has already made sure the product sells. So you know that your traffic will result in sales.

Obviously affiliate marketing makes sense – these benefits make it a clear winner!

There is one major drawback…

You work hard to send the traffic to the product owner’s website, but once you do that you will never see those visitors again. Unfortunately, the majority of those visitors (at least 90%) will not buy on their first visit. And of the 10% or less that do buy, the product owner will be able to sell to them again, but you will not.

How can you avoid this pitfall?

What you need to do is capture the contact info of your visitors before sending them to the product website. By getting their contact info, you can follow up increase your odds of making the sale by sending them back to the product owner’s website multiple times. And if you want to do it like a pro, you’ll give them some great content before sending them to the sales page.

Here’s what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

You’ll be building your own list of potential customers that you can market to again and again.
You’re generating good will by giving them high-quality content. This way, they are much more likely to make a purchase when you send them to the sales page.

If you want to create an affiliate marketing system like this, you’ll need the following:

A Video Squeeze Page (with video)
One or more content-rich “warm up” pages
At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series

The video squeeze page is where you’ll direct your traffic instead of directly to the product sales page. Your squeeze page adds your visitors to you autoresponder. This is how you start building your list, and at the same time begin sending them useful information. Then it redirects them to your content pages after they subscribe to your email series.

The content pages provide valuable information for your visitors and make them more receptive to the sales message that you’ll link to from inside the content. While they’re reading the content you’ve provided, your email system is already following up with them to send them back to the product website again and again.

All of this together increases your chances of making the sale by up to 500% so it’s well worth the effort of setting it up. After setting it up, you simply send visitors to your squeeze page instead of the sales page. And the rest runs on auto-pilot.

Setting it all up yourself requires some skill, and if you’re not up to it, you can use a service like Affiliate Silver Bullet. With a service like that, you don’t have to do anything. They make the video, build the squeeze page, write the email series, develop the content mini-site, etc. And then just give you a finished package. The major benefit of using a service like this is that you can get started right away, and for a whole lot less than it would cost to do it all yourself. The drawback is that you won’t be the only one using these affiliate tools. But the internet is huge, so this shouldn’t really affect you.

Alternatively, you can use a service like Elance to “outsource” each of these compnents. Whichever way you decided to go, it’s critical to get an affiliate marketing system like this in place, if you’re at all serious about your business.

Tagged with: Affiliate Marketing • email marketing • Internet Marketing